A better way to hunt alien life

Atronomers are examining a meteor shower in another star system:

The Spitzer Space Telescope spotted the infrared glow of a band of dust three times as far from Eta Corvi as Earth is from the sun. Carey Lisse of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, and his colleagues analysed the spectrum of light from this glow and found that it contains water, organics and rock. New Scientist

If we can get bigger apertures up in space, then we can use spectral analysis to hunt for biological markers. Making very large telescopes in space is very simple, because space is weightless. Their construction is very regular and small robots can build them.